Monday, April 6, 2009

The Rhodes are basically a new family to Challengeville in so far as I hadn't really played them yet in this neighborhood, though I did post a short introduction to them along with a few pics of when I actually did their challenge here. As a refresher, here's the members of the household, shown here with pictures extracted with SimPE before I gave them all makeovers.

Before, I had to have Dusty have a miserable childhood. This time I wanted to give him a good one to make up for it. With this basic thought in mind, and expecting to have a quiet week of normal sim family life, I loaded up the lot and started playing them. They had a few surprises in store for me though. Read on to see the tale of their week, which turned out to be a rather busy one...

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Life had fallen into a routine for the Rhodes family. Sunny and Rainee, though seemingly happy and content with their lives, often wondered why had gotten married since neither felt any particular attraction to the other. But they both very much wanted a family, so once Dusty had arrived, they'd settled into being parents and pursuing their careers, and hadn't really given their marriage much more thought. They would eat dinner as a family when they could, but it was often a quiet affair, with one or the other of them talking with Dusty but not much with each other.

Woody had recently decided to leave his career in business to pursue his dream of teaching, and eventually becoming the Minister of Education. He wanted to be close to his son, so when Dusty started elementary school, he took time out in the evening to help him with his homework.

And the help was paying off, for Dusty started getting good grades almost right away. As a reward, his parents let him get a womrat, and as he put the little creature in it's cage the first time, he discovered that he was really interested in Nature.

Playing with Pooky, the name he'd given his womrat, made him happy, though it quickly became apparent he wouldn't be able to keep the cage in his room since the sound of Pooky running on his wheel would keep Dusty awake at night.

Meanwhile, Rainee had been working hard at her security guard job, and finally earned a promotion and the chance to attend the Police Academy. She was excited, for it brought her one step closer to her dream of becoming Captain Hero.

Despite their occassional daytime troubles, in the bedroom things had still been going fine between Sunny and Rainee, and shortly after coming home with her promotion, Rainee discovered that she was pregnant again. She was somewhat disappointed that she wouldn't be able to start at the Academy right away now, but happy about having another child.

Sunny had also been working hard after making the change to the Education field, and quickly began earning promotions as well.

He continued helping Dusty with his homework at night, and it wasn't long before Dusty had become an A+ student. He was very excited the day he brought home his first A+ report card, and ran in to show it to his mother, but she was too busy talking with one of her friends on the phone to pay much attention to him.

The days flew by, and before she knew it or was quite ready, Rainee went into labor just as she was getting ready to go to bed.

Though she had done this before with Dusty, she was totally unprepared for the long ordeal that she was about to go through, or for how many more children she would have when it was all over.

She and Sunny quickly arranged to have more cribs delivered to the house to accomodate the quads, and together they spent the rest of the night taking care of them. Sunny had to go to work the next morning, but Rainee opted to use one of the extra vacation days she'd been given to stay home with the babies. She did, however, have Dusty call and hire a butler to come help them before he left for school. She was simply too busy feeding babies and changing diapers to be able to make the call herself. That afternoon, Sunny came home with another promotion.

He was thrilled about being able to teach at Dusty's school now, though he knew Rainee would be glad that he'd be off the next few days now since it was the weekend. Rainee was glad, for despite having some help from the new butler, her day had been really hectic taking care of 4 newborns. She laid down to finally take a nap when Sunny got home, deciding that it was his turn to look after them for awhile. When she awoke later that night, she did what many women do when they're stressed...she went shopping. First she went by the bookstore and bought cell phones for herself and Sunny, and also one for Dusty since she knew it wouldn't be long before he'd be a teenager and wanting a phone of his own.

While she was there, she met Jan Tellerman, and proudly told her about the new additions to her family.

Then she headed over to Nerissa's Clothing Store where she bought herself a new outfit and gave herself a bit of a makeover in the bathroom there. She decided that wearing her hair down would likely be easier for now, since she wouldn't likely have much time for styling it in an elegant french roll like she had been doing.

Then she headed over to the BV General Store, where she got some groceries, tried some Pineapple Surprise at the Polynesian food stand there, and hung out for awhile to play some pinball.

She struck up a conversation with one of the men there that she found herself quite attracted to. Much more attracted than she really was to Sunny at least.

She simply chatted with him for awhile before saying goodbye, for she knew that now was not the time to be endangering her marriage. She had four new infants who needed their parents to look after them. Finally she headed home, for it was getting rather late now, and she was beginning to feel guilty about leaving Sunny all alone with the quads for so long while she had fun.

Dusty meanwhile was finding ways to keep himself occupied while his parents' attention was consumed with his new brothers and sister. He would play on the monkey bars and slide in the back yard a lot, but had also started trying to paint using the old easel that they had upstairs. One night, a strange blonde lady came into their house and gave him a membership card for a secret artist's lot. He wasn't sure if he'd get to use it for awhile, since he knew his parents would be much to busy to take him there, but maybe once he'd gotten older he could.

As any parent can tell you, babys grow up far too quickly, and in what seemed like no time at all, it was time for the quads to become toddlers. Nightfall on the evening of their birthday found Sunny as the one "on duty", so one by one he helped his babies to make the transition.

And so began the next phase of their parenting life, one that proved to be even more hectic as they set about trying to teach their children the skills they would need in life. They had gotten some smart milk to help them learn, but it didn't take long before their stress levels rose so much that they found it was all they could do to manage to get them regular bottles from the fridge, and so most of the special milk went unused. The first to learn a skill was Delana, who had been one to have the advantage of one of the bottle of smart milk early on, and so learned how to use the potty by herself much faster than her siblings.

Next to master the skill was Dalton, who had also gotten some of the smart milk early on.

In the midst of all the commotion of trying to teach the toddlers their skills, Dusty's birthday went largely unnoticed by his parents. Taking it in stride, however, Dusty made the transition on his own and grew up well due to attention they had given him before his siblings were born.

He decided to devote his life to knowledge and the arts, deciding that he wanted to join the Sim City Ballet company eventually.

When they weren't being taught a skill, the quads would play with the various toys that Sunny and Rainee had bought them. Delana became particularly interested in the little xylophone.

When Sunny had to go back to work on Monday, Rainee decided to try something a little less physically demanding and sat down with Darren to teach him how to talk.

That day, Sunny earned yet another promotion. He was amazed at how quickly he was managing to climb the career ladder, and though he was pretty tired and stressed from helping take care of the quads, he was still happy about it, especially since it meant he could now get special bookcase for his family that would help his children learn all of their skills faster as they continued to grow.

Now that Dusty was a teenager, he really began to notice how hard his parents were having to work trying to teach his brothers and sister all of their skills. So he decided to help them out some, and sat down with Delana after school and taught her how to talk while Rainee helped Darren on the potty.

It wasn't long after Delana spoke her first words with Dusty's help that Darren finally learned how to use the potty on his own.

Later that evening, Damien finally mastered the skill as well.

Due to the constant attention they received from their parents, and from the butler, the quads were by and large happy and healthy children. They got along well with one another, and from time to time a couple of them would pull themselves up on wobbly legs and huggle one another.

Though they didn't know if they'd manage to teach all four of the children all of their skills before they became children and figured things out on their own, Sunny and Rainee were giving it their best shot, and as they frequently took time to tickle and snuggle the babes, they felt fairly confident that they would all grow up well at least. But only time could tell.

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Author's notes: I initially wasn't all that excited about playing this family next, since I really expected it to a rather boring routine of eating/sleeping/skilling/etc. for them. And it did start out that way for the most part, though with the birth of the quads, things definitely got interesting in a hurry. And with as much trouble as I was having keeping up with all of them all the time, I'm sure I'd fail miserably at the Toddlermania challenge. I'm sure many of you reading that have done that challenge are familiar with inhabitant bars that look like this:

That's a lot of dirty diapers.

Also, you'd think that a day after having quads, the last thing Rainee would want would be to have more babies. But nope, this is what she rolled as one of her wants almost right away after the birth. Sunny started rolling the same want as well a day or two later. I haven't yet decided if I'll let them go for it or not...maybe I will eventually, but not until the quads are a bit older and don't require so much attention from the adults.

Though despite the want, they certainly don't look happy about having all the babies on the lot loading screen.

I forgot to take note of the toddlers' personalities, but I'll be sure to include their stats when I make it back here for their round 2. Finally, here's a look at what they all looked like at the end of the week after I left their lot:

Thanks for reading. Next up is the Shi residence, with Sue and Shea Shi (say that 5 times fast).

Yes, I have ACR installed along with the Triplets & Quads mod. The quads were actually originally the result of ACR...Sunny and Rainee went to bed and woohoo'd on their own because of that, and she got pregnant. Then the "Random Babies" option on the T&Q mod gave me 4 of them.